Do you feel like you’re just plodding along with your social media campaigns?

Are you trying to realise business growth using social media, but can’t seem to push forwards?

Social media is without doubt the most powerful tool that any business owner can use to reach and engage customers. Even though most small business owners understand how important social media is to their development and performance, it’s usually still a theoretical understanding. They’re not taking advantage of it’s full potential.

The good news is that creating social media growth isn’t as difficult as you might think. It just takes some patience, effort and understanding. Here are 7 top tips to make social media growth happen.

1. Make Your Content Invaluable To Your Followers

Whatever social media platform you’re active on, users have one thing in common. They all want invaluable, useful and entertaining content.

Make sure you offer everything that your followers want, whatever type of content works and for whatever industry or niche you operate in.

By offering high quality, invaluable content, it’s likely get digested by readers but more importantly, create desirable actions. When people find something useful, they know that others around them may also find it useful, creating more chances of social sharing.

2. Vary Your Content

Posting the same thing over and over again just gets repetitive and looks spammy. This goes for the format of content, be it textual, links, images or video, and the type of content itself. While you may prefer to share in-depth, analysis-based articles, remember that people react differently to different content. There will be times when shorter, lighter content is more desirable.

Developing the variety of content you publish can establish social media growth by attracting and retaining more types of readers. No one is the same, so try casting the net wider in terms of what content you share in your streams.

3. Know Your Target Market

Have your target market in mind whenever you are participating in social media. Does the tweet speak volumes to your audience? Does that Facebook status connect with them in some way?

If your updates attract the wrong type of people, ideal social media growth isn’t going to happen. You might attract readers, but the wrong ones in terms of the product or services you are providing. A smaller audience of engaged prospects is much better than a massive audience of random people.

The best way to make this work for you is by creating personas for your target audience. These are personas based on your average followers, and you should have them in mind whenever you are posting something. If it’s not something that the personas would click on, read or act upon, there’s no point in sharing it.

4. Get To Know Your Platform

Avoid choosing too many social networks until you have the resources to effectively manage them all. Using too many and stretching too thin just makes your marketing efforts confused. You’re not going to see the social media growth you want, because each platform has different types of users who expect different marketing tactics and strategies.

If you think strategically about your social media campaigns, then you understand that it takes time and effort to create tactics that work to your business objectives. Focusing on the social networks that you can manage in a complementary manner will provide structure for you to develop growth.

5. Interact In Other Ways

You can’t just share your own content and expect to realise any significant social media growth. You need to interact with others on each platform you use.

Have discussions with people about the content they share, and speak to them about their interests and concerns. It’s also worth curating content for your social media streams that you deem useful to your audiences. But don’t always expect reciprocation.

Building networks is really important if you want to see true social media growth. The whole point of social media is to be sociable. Always reply back to people as soon as you can, but remember to proactively look out for engagement opportunities by listening to the social environment.

6. Get Active

To see social media growth, you need to be active on your social media accounts. People want to visit and see what’s new. They want to read your latest piece of content, new product information or industry news that interests you.

With businesses who sell 24/7 online, customers expect 24/7 social media coverage too. It’s a mistake not to invest in round the clock activity because there will be many opportunities to alleviate concerns and fulfil buyer expectations during out of hours.

These types of customer service strategies typically require very fast responses to convert interested people to buyers. Not being there to see them over the line can be a huge drain on your growth potential. The social media world doesn’t stop – especially when you’re selling and marketing to a in global audience.

7. Track The Metrics

If you don’t know how well your social media campaigns and business practices are performing, you won’t be able to acknowledge growth or set targets to meet. You also won’t be able to understand what refinements are needed to reach your goals and objectives.

It’s a huge mistake and drain on social media growth when you don’t know or understand the metrics. Conducting solid analysis and measurement will enable you to realise gaps that need filling and growth opportunities that you might otherwise miss. It also provides you with reliable data to make good decisions going forwards.

You should be undertaking social media analysis, reporting and refinement in a circular framework so that you ensure you continually improve your efforts and grow your business.

Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping. (Julia Margaret Cameron, British Photographer)

Make it a priority to periodically measure your marketing metrics and adjust accordingly.

Social Media Growth Is Essential

Social media can be a catalyst for achieving business growth. And in business, if you’re not moving forwards, then you’re standing still. And if you’re standing still, you’re likely to get hit hard by change.

Change that you don’t see coming and that can have devastating effects on your business.

About AuthorStuartJDavidson

Stuart is a digital marketing strategist living in Kent, UK. Stuart blogs at StuartJDavidson.com where he shares his extensive freelance and corporate marketing experiences. He is also the author of "How to Win in Social Media".

Understanding the audience/followers is so crucial otherwise we won’t be able to provide content to their likings. And if the content is not interesting or valuable to them, it is certain that the content won’t do well in terms of likes/tweet/+1s or shares!

Being present is another crucial thing – without it we cannot expect engagement and reshares 🙂

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I realised that I’m not leveraging my most valuable asset, my own knowledge and experiences. So I decided to setup this blog to share my learning’s and to provide quality advice and tutorials to those who need it.

Thanks for the tips Stuart. I was wondering, which social media platform…

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